The Unanswerable Jewish Question

On Belonging, Nationalism, and Jewish Identity

Rain Landscape, Vasily Kandinsky

A friend and fellow writer reached out after reading my recent pieces on the unraveling of Zionist mythology with a question that cuts to the heart of what many secular Jews are grappling with today. "Thanks for turning me on to Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro," he wrote. "Very illuminating stuff. I'm curious what he thinks about Jews like you and me. We're not Torah Jews, our subjectivities are very much organized by American liberalism and Zionism, even if we oppose the way that had been pre-constructed for us. So what are we if we don't fulfill the 613 mitzvoth?"

His question illuminates a profound tension that extends beyond individual identity into the realm of collective Jewish existence. What he's really asking is where secular Jews fit in the battle to reclaim Jewish identity from Zionism's grip, particularly when the most articulate critics like Rabbi Shapiro speak from positions of religious authority. Answering this question reveals something essential about our current moment. It also involves going back hundreds of years to see how the Jewish question that emerged in the eighteenth century remains fundamentally unresolved. Zionism's attempt to answer it has only deepened our collective crisis.

The Unfinished Debate

The Jewish question itself emerged from European modernity's collision with traditional Jewish life, as emancipation offered Jews entry into European society while demanding they resolve their "otherness." Would Jews remain a people apart, defined by religious law and communal bonds, or could they become citizens like any other with their Jewishness reduced to private belief?

This debate over belonging and the price of acceptance has haunted Jewish communities for centuries, spawning movements from Reform Judaism to Bundism to cultural nationalism and even complete assimilation. Zionism emerged as one answer among many, though it has since claimed monopoly over Jewish identity itself. It should be noted that Jewish communities in Muslim countries haven't struggled with this issue in the same way, largely due to the construction of those societies.

Rejection in Europe

Understanding Zionism's origins and relationship to the Jewish question reveals why both religious and secular Jews share common cause in opposing it regardless of their relationship to Torah observance. The movement's founders were predominantly assimilated Jews who initially believed the Jewish question could be solved through total integration into European society. Theodor Herzl spent years convinced that mass conversion to Christianity would end antisemitism, while Max Nordau cultivated the persona of a cosmopolitan European intellectual. Even Vladimir Jabotinsky began as a Russian writer who signed his articles with decidedly non-Jewish pen names. There is an old joke that speaks to this. What's the difference between Herzl and Jesus? Herzl celebrated Christmas and Jesus celebrated Hanuka.

Zionist leaders like Herzl pursued assimilation with the fervor of those convinced they could transcend their origins through sheer force of will. They adopted local languages with native fluency, embraced European culture as their own, and distanced themselves from anything that marked them as distinctly Jewish. (Some Hebrew writers like David Vogel rejected this trend at the time, please see my review of his work.) Their initial solution to the Jewish question was elegantly simple and shocking: cease being recognizably Jewish and antisemitism would naturally disappear.

The persistence of European antisemitism shattered these illusions with brutal efficiency. The Dreyfus Affair demonstrated that even the most assimilated Jew remained vulnerable to ancient hatreds, while the rise of racial antisemitism made clear that no amount of cultural adaptation could erase Jewish difference in the eyes of those determined to see it. Faced with the failure of assimilation, these same figures didn't question the antisemitic premise that Jewish difference was indeed a problem requiring solution. Instead, they internalized it.

From Failed Assimilation to Fatal Compromise

This internalization marks the crucial turn toward Zionism and reveals why the movement represents such a fundamental betrayal of Jewish tradition and ethics. Rather than defending Jewish particularity or challenging the demand that Jews transform themselves to gain acceptance, Zionist leaders accepted the diagnosis and merely proposed a different cure. If Jews couldn't become European through assimilation, they would become European through nationalism and the creation of their own state on the model of France or Germany.

The tragedy deepens when we recognize how thoroughly this nationalist solution reproduced the very antisemitic logic it claimed to combat. Early Zionist writings overflow with contempt for diaspora Jewish life that mirrors the worst antisemitic propaganda. In the eyes of Zionist leaders, the traditional Jew was weak, parasitic, effeminate, diseased, and everything European nationalism defined itself against. The Zionist solution wasn't to challenge these characterizations but to create a "new Jew" who embodied their opposite. Namely, a Jew that was strong, rooted in land, militaristic, and freed from the supposed pathologies of exile.

This transformation required more than territorial concentration. It demanded the complete redefinition of Jewish existence. Judaism's emphasis on study, prayer, and ethical obligation had to give way to the cultivation of national consciousness. The portable homeland of text and tradition that had sustained Jews through centuries of displacement must be abandoned for the fixed borders of the nation-state. Most fundamentally, Jewish identity itself required conversion from a covenant with the divine to a compact with state power.

Here we arrive at why secular and religious Jews face the same existential threat from Zionism's dominance over Jewish identity. Whether one observes the 613 commandments or finds meaning in cultural traditions, whether one attends synagogue or connects through family recipes and political commitments, all expressions of Jewish life that don't center the State of Israel become suspect, incomplete, or inauthentic according to Zionist logic. The movement that began by accepting antisemitic premises about Jewish inadequacy now enforces those premises on Jews themselves.

My friend's question about where secular Jews fit in this struggle reflects how successfully Zionism has colonized our imagination. By positioning itself as the sole authentic expression of Jewish identity, it forces us into false choices between religious observance and nationalist allegiance, as if these were the only options available. But Jewish history offers far richer possibilities than this impoverished binary suggests.

Consider the Bundists who fought for Jewish cultural autonomy while building solidarity with their non-Jewish neighbors. Remember the generations of secular Jews who found profound meaning in languages like Yiddish and Ladino, in labor movements and literary traditions, in the ethical demands of prophetic Judaism stripped of its ritual requirements. These approaches to Jewish life shared a common thread. They didn't require transforming Jews into something else to justify their existence.

The current moment demands we recover these alternative visions, not as museum pieces but as living possibilities. When Orthodox Jews refuse military service and diaspora Jews declare "not in our name," we see the emergence of something Zionism cannot contain or explain. This explains their hysterical reaction to student protests on American college campuses or the delusions of The Free Press. These acts of resistance emerge from different sources—religious law, ethical commitment, human solidarity—but converge on the same recognition. What Zionism demands in the name of Jewish identity violates everything worth preserving about Jewish existence.

This convergence matters because Zionism threatens all forms of Jewish life simultaneously. Externally, it endangers Jewish communities worldwide by binding their fate to a state's criminal actions. Internally, it corrodes Jewish life by replacing ethics with ethnicity, tradition with territory, and the pursuit of justice with the projection of power. The secular Jew finding meaning in family traditions, the Reform Jew adapting ancient practices, the Orthodox Jew seeing divine command in every gesture all face the same demand to subordinate their understanding of Jewishness to a militarized ethno-state. All become "partial" Jews unless they accept that their highest obligation is defending Israeli policy regardless of moral cost. Against this totalizing claim, we must assert the irreducible diversity of Jewish experience.

Leaving the Jewish Question Unanswered

The urgent task before us isn't to resolve the Jewish question but to reject its terms entirely. Jews require no solution because Jewish existence isn't a problem. If you think this dynamic isn't still in play, you are missing the obvious. Why is it that American Jews harbor such a deep devotion to a foreign country that operates in a language that they don't understand and behaves in ways they find unethical? The answer can be found in how the Jewish question has been left unresolved and open.

The varieties of Jewish life—religious and secular, traditional and innovative, rooted in text or expressed through culture—all represent legitimate ways of being Jewish in the world. They need no state to validate them, no army to defend them, and no ideology to justify them.

The Jewish question remains unresolved because every proposed answer has demanded we become something other than what we are. Against these transformative projects, we must insist on a simpler truth: Jews exist in all our complexity and contradiction, and that existence requires no external justification. In recognizing this—as my friend did when he saw how Shapiro's critique spoke to him despite their different relationships to religious practice—we find the seed of solidarity our moment demands. The work before us isn't to finally solve the Jewish question but to create conditions where it no longer needs asking, where Jewish life in all its forms can flourish without the false protection of militarized nationalism.